Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader sends this snippet from an AFP report:
"California-based rocket maker SpaceX said that it will make a test flight in late November to the International Space Station, now that NASA has retired its space shuttle program. 'SpaceX has been hard at work preparing for our next flight — a mission designed to demonstrate that a privately-developed space transportation system can deliver cargo to and from the International Space Station (ISS),' the company, also called Space Exploration Technologies, said in a statement. The mission is the second to be carried out by SpaceX, one of a handful of firms competing to make a spaceship to replace the now-defunct US shuttle, which had been used to carry supplies and equipment to the orbiting outpost. 'NASA has given us a November 30, 2011 launch date, which should be followed nine days later by Dragon berthing at the ISS,' the company said."
SpaceX has an information sheet for the Dragon capsule, as well as an interesting post about the costs involved in their launches.

As far as I know, NASA doesn't have a factory. Everything they used was made by the likes of Boeing, Lockheed and others. All NASA added was 50 layers of management, to ensure that everything was behind schedule and over budget.

Nevermind the engineers who figure out what kind of craft is needed to complete the mission, how it will complete the mission, and what to do when it goes wrong. Boeing, et al. handled all of that, right.

Ouch, guess you told him. OTH here is a nice little quote from the Space X career page,SpaceX is a US based space technology company founded by its residing CEO and CTO, Elon Musk, the former co-founder of PayPal. The company's goal is to renew a sense of excellence in the space industry by disrupting the current paradigm of complacency and replacing it with innovation and commercialized price points; laying the foundation for a truly space-faring human civilization.Notice the back handed insult? The clev

Nearly perfect machines? Except for 40% of them blowing up and killing the entire crew, I suppose your right. It is dangerous activity, and accidents are inevitable. Using the word perfect in any context (even qualified with nearly) with NASA is absurd.

Maybe you didn't mean machines (even though you said machines). Maybe you meant missions. 2/135 of them ended with the complete obliteration of the crew. Acceptable for a high-risk exploration machine? I certainly think it is. Anywhere near perfect? N

Nearly perfect machines? Except for 40% of them blowing up and killing the entire crew, I suppose your right.

Compare this to the other nations around the world that have no space programs, it's not (always) because they don't care, it's because they know they couldn't pull it off even if they tried. NASA could be better, but I don't think there's a similar group on this planet that's better than NASA.

Yes, the Russians do manned more reliably, but I've always felt that they were doing manned missions just for the sake of "being there" and not really trying to accomplish much beyond that. CNSA can hardly get credit for following 30 years behind and doing a small volume of missions using "borrowed" technology - per-capita, the Chinese citizens domestically launched into-space ratio is laughably small.

I will say that for the shuttle main computers, the software engineering standards are perhaps the highest in the computer industry and really do set the gold standard for software design and review. On average the software engineers developing the guidance system software produce about 4,000-5,000 lines of code per year.... and the rest of the time is spent busting up each other's software and mathematically proving the correctness of the algorithms they've produced. The amount of software generated per programmer may be even less, but it seems like that is about the right figure from what I remember.

In that sense, perfection is perhaps the appropriate word to be used, but it is in certain contexts. That said, the overall spacecraft design for the Shuttle did have some incredibly huge and sadly fatal design flaws, so I agree with your general sentiment that perfect is perhaps a bit overstated. The problem with spaceships is that you can't fix bugs with software that your hardware engineers couldn't resolve. There is this little thing called physics that must be dealt with and can't be brushed aside. Then again, that is why the Shuttle program was a couple of decades late in being canceled.

Maybe you didn't mean machines (even though you said machines). Maybe you meant missions. 2/135 of them ended with the complete obliteration of the crew.

They meant machines, and the way you evaluate the record of the machines is failures/missions. Not failures/machines.

You wouldn't say the PDP-11 was a bad machine because 99.9% of them are defunct, or that Toyota Tercels were unreliable because 95% of them are in the scrapyard. You'd talk about MTBF, or miles driven. It's the work you get out of the machine before failure that counts. Especially when the chance of failure occurs when you use it, not as a consequence of its existence.

That's a stupid and irrelevant way to judge the record of the vehicles, though. The chance of failure is per mission, not per vehicle. Even the best, most reliable vehicle with a 99.999% success rate will eventually fail given enough missions, ergo the failure rate for the best machine ever would still approach 100%. In the case of the shuttle, the same mission record but with fewer orbiters built would mean the failure rate is higher. Clearly this metric is not telling us anything useful.

Challenger exploded on it's 10th mission. It was supposedly designed for a lot more than that. Columbia failed on the 28th mission, which still is not a lot. The original vision was to have launches every week.

This sounds like the opinion of someone without any age under their belt. Although NASA subcontracts for 'parts' and equipment, they are pretty much a top down organization, much like Apple in that respect. It doesn't mean they aren't in full control of their projects. Without NASA, we wouldn't have been the first on the Moon. A feat still unrepeated for over 40 years. They had a unique style to getting things done in the beginning. Something that got lost over the years under regulation and administration

"Although NASA subcontracts for 'parts' and equipment, they are pretty much a top down organization, much like Apple in that respect. It doesn't mean they aren't in full control of their projects. Without NASA, we wouldn't have been the first on the Moon."

The contractors in the Apollo program did a lot of their own engineering. I remember watching a documentary about the LEM, and how Grumman had to solve a lot of challenges, flowing change requests up to NASA. Sure NASA was heavily involved, but it wasn't like all ideas originated from the top.

I don't intend this post as a knock against NASA, just your perception of them.

I find it interesting is to listen to those still living (though Aaron Cohen died last year) who were major players in the Apollo program. Although Schmitt is among one of the speakers, I consider major players are those that stayed on the ground, it takes non-astronauts to make major decisions and get resources from Congress and the President. Though I myself have not watched this yet. I did watch some others about Shuttle by Dale Myers, Aaron Cohen, and Chris Kraft. Much of the history I knew but how the

Just to be clear, this isn't "NASA's process", it's the new normal for just about everything which requires Congressional approval. If a gear doesn't touch all 40+ states during manufacture, it probably won't get built.

Sure they designed their hardware but they have also relied on using the past 40+ years of NASA's and the participating contractors successes and failures as their starting point. It's not like they developed a warp engine or anything. At most they have made minor improvements on existing concepts and models.

Apparently the ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle and JAXA's H-II Transfer vehicle can also resupply the ISS [wikipedia.org], so the Russians do not have a lock on unmanned missions to it. I wonder when Dragon will be ready for human "payload"?

That's what I'm wondering too. I know that getting something man-rated is a lot more difficult than just cargo-rated. I'd bet that many of the systems require for human use will be installed on the demonstrator even if it's going up with a bunch of cargo, just to prove those systems work, and to assist in achieving certification for use for people. What I wonder, though, is how many launches, how many non-launched capsules, and how many years would b

There was a suicide which took place in a ground-based vacuum chamber. It wasn't pretty and rarely gets talked about... in part because of the circumstances involved. Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.

Just like several astronauts who died for mundane causes like a plane crash or auto accident are not listed on the space memorial wall.... even if those deaths happened during "training". Perhaps that may change some day.

But the saliva in your mouth can boil, you get real bad nosebleed, and other problems can happen as well. The main issue is oxygen deprivation of the brain, which is irreversible damage and head-smacking obvious. The other stuff, while nasty, can be overcome if you get back under pressurization quickly.

The main issue is oxygen deprivation of the brain, which is irreversible damage and head-smacking obvious. The other stuff, while nasty, can be overcome if you get back under pressurization quickly.

Yes, but it doesn't happen instantly. If it did, people doing freediving would also be in trouble. (The pressure gradient is in the opposite direction there, but the difference is also much larger; you get to 2 atmospheres of pressure — as much difference as between sea level and outer space — at only about 10m deep.)

So that scene in 2001 with David Bowman jumping out of the space pod into the emergency airlock could be possible, even though you would suffer some damage? At least you would not have blood pouring out of you like in Event Horizon.

That scene was written by Arthur C Clarke directly from NASA research, ACC had a lot of friends inside NASA, and wrote several stories based on stuff he got "from the horse's mouth". Not leaked - it was all public knowledge. But he got to talk to the researchers not just read the press releases and papers.

Not so fast with internal blood pressure! The relative peak blood pressure is, say, 120mmHg = 16kPa = 0.16bar. The boiling point of water is about 50C at that pressure, so you're right -- at the systolic peak the blood will not boil. I don't know how high the absolute average pressure in your body would be with vacuum on the outside. I'd guess around 6kPa, since that's the boiling pressure of water at your internal temperature. However, there are large veins close to the heart with negative blood pressure -

It is possible to go pop from explosive decompression though. Just not from one atmosphere. The Byford Dolphin accident is a particually messy example. From nine atmospheres to one in an instant.

One person's lungs exploded so hard, they severed his spine and ejected part of it across the room. Bits of person were recovered from a platform ten meters above. That is a hollywood-worthy explosive decompression event.

According to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_(spacecraft) [wikipedia.org], in 4-6 years. Figure ten at the outside. I'd bet that could be accelerated to 2-3 years if NASA actually had the authority to tender a cash contract up front to get it flying next in two years with a moderate safety margin.

That's what I'm wondering too. I know that getting something man-rated is a lot more difficult than just cargo-rated.

Tell me when realistic human rating standards ever get established for spaceflight in America. At the moment, the only standard that I'm aware of is if the NASA administrator or one of his deputies simply declares that a spacecraft meets "man-rating" because that is what it was designed to do. So far, not a single spacecraft (including the Space Shuttle) ever met that human-rating requirement that was anything other than an arbitrary decision.

Tell me when realistic human rating standards ever get established for spaceflight in America. At the moment, the only standard that I'm aware of is if the NASA administrator or one of his deputies simply declares that a spacecraft meets "man-rating" because that is what it was designed to do.

that's just one. there are dozens of NASA 'human rating' standards documents that are expected to be followed, plus (possibly) some standards that are unofficial or just in the heads of certain managers.

SpaceX say they have adhered to every *published* NASA human rating requirement. they keep asking if there's anything else that's not published..

BTW the space shuttle did not follow several of those standards, but was 'waived'.

It has to create an abort system, their plan is to load it will small thrusters on the capsule that will engage and take it away from the rocket. This system will work at any point in launch and will also serve as a landing method for the moon and maybe Mars.

I don't think it matters what the price is. All of the alternatives to Dragon (and NASA is almost certain to go with 2 options) are planned for the Atlas V, which is expensive enough that without a significant increase in flight rate I can't see it beating the Russians on price. The point is not to find the lowest cost provider, but to enable reasonably priced domestic providers.

Thursday the froyo flavor is going to cake batter, should be a high note to go out on.

Is this some kind of spaceX code meaning the dragon will use android 2.2 on its main computers? (yes, google's naming conventions for android releases have ruined me, they are even worse then ubuntu with their leprose lemurs and demented donkeys)

Also, hats off to you rocket scientist guys, makes me wish i was made of sterner stuff and actually went to aeronautics school instead of electronics.. Being a programmer seems very menial right now.

Unfortunately it's not a code for anything, we just have a frozen yogurt bar at work and they change the two flavors bi weekly. It's normally original tart cause elon supposedly likes that the most, but we get some interesting things every once in a while

And we've got a bunch of programmers, jobs are posted on the main site (careers page) if you're interested

Thanks to both you guys. I got to stand feet away from the Dragon capsule that went to space and back an hour after watching the last shuttle launch. Pretty. Farking. Awesome. Keep up the amazing work.

Sending NASA back to the drawing boards to develop breakthrough technologies for deep space exploration is what it should do, let private enterprise do what has already been proven. Breaking the power of the aero-industrial complex with their legions of lobbyists and congressmen in their pockets took guts to do. This is a giant leap in the right direction.

Ironic that people (used to?) claim that Obama was a socialist. Sure he spent taxpayer money to save the auto industry. Now it is being paid back although admittedly projections are that the government will lose 1.5 Billion upfront. Still, considering how many Millions of jobs were directly and indirectly (suppliers, communities) saved, that $1.5 Billion was well spent. And that's not even considering the taxes these now highly profitable enterprises (record sales and growth) are returning to the treasury and will be doing so (hopefully) for many years to come.

That about sums up the problem here. I've raised the issue in Republican political discussion forums thinking that maybe somebody might get a clue that Republican congressmen are two faced on this particular issue. Such discussion threads usually go like a lead balloon and die a premature death as nobody responds or even sees a problem... or worse yet defends Republican congressmen for their actions to support a

I've raised the issue in Republican political discussion forums thinking that maybe somebody might get a clue that Republican congressmen are two faced on this particular issue. Such discussion threads usually go like a lead balloon and die a premature death as nobody responds or even sees a problem... or worse yet defends Republican congressmen for their actions to support a central design bureau with a command economy structure because it benefits their own districts.

Questioning Republican policies on Republican forums is like questioning the existence of God on Rapture Ready forums.

The thing is, if you question the existence of God on a religious forum of some kind, I promise that you will get at least one if not a dozen replies, and if you start to reply defending your position it can turn into a flamefest royale. Ditto of you start to proclaim that Ronald Reagan was a tax and spend liberal or that we must return to a 90% tax bracket for the wealthy on Republican forums.

Instead, all I get when I mention the space policy of Republicans in Congress on these forums is a dead silence, o

That about sums up the problem here. I've raised the issue in Republican political discussion forums thinking that maybe somebody might get a clue that Republican congressmen are two faced on this particular issue. Such discussion threads usually go like a lead balloon and die a premature death as nobody responds or even sees a problem... or worse yet defends Republican congressmen for their actions to support a central design bureau with a command economy structure because it benefits their own districts.

..."central design bureau" sounds like what they had in Soviet Russia. Since it is many Republicans pushing the SLS, Space Launch System or what some call "Senate Launch System." I say we call it the Socialist Launch System!

Look at the posts here that whine about government taxes paying for a space programme now being entered by private American companies. See their total lack of a vision for America and humanity? See their commitment to destroying what is perhaps America's - and humanity's - greatest achievements and endeavors? See them demanding we do nothing but the purely private business that would never have gone to space, or if it eventually did (after much loss of life and limb) would never have shared any of what it s

When you libertarians destroy the government, the anarchy you create is immediately filled by the expanding corporate power we use government to protect us from. Corporations are very libertarian, the way that chickens are very egg.

No, it is perfectly clear that we agree that's where corporate power comes from. What you don't seem to realize is that without the government, corporations will not be limited to the power they derive from the state, but rather will consume all powers the state now keeps for itself, and the even greater remaining powers that we still manage to limit the US government to. That's corporate anarchy. That's what drowning the government in a bathtub will give us: warlords bathing in blood, calling themselves CE

No, I made that up all by myself. Your Ron Paul screeching, though, was manufactured by a Republican marketing corp. You libertarians are so scared of your own shadow that you're nothing but a cartoon of yourselves.

"It's a very sobering feeling to be up in space and realize that one's safety factor was determined by the lowest bidder on a government contract." - Alan Shepard (supposedly, it's often quoted but I haven't seen a definitive source)

Government contractors usually get to hide behind the same government. So when they screw up they get paid more to do it right the next time. Private contractors cannot afford the screw ups. Oh I am sure they will screw up but when your trying to make a buck in a high risk area you do your damned best to eliminate all those risks, especially ones that will end your business like losing a life.

You ever work for a private contractor? I assure you, they screw up all the time. Sometimes it costs them, sometimes they dodge it. Sometimes they learn, sometimes they don't. Cronyism, nepotism, favoritism, bureaucracy, inertia, etc., all exist in the corporate world, too.

SpaceX succeeds because they're new and small and nimble and aren't tied to existing dead weight. And more power to them for it.

The main advantage of private industry is that (ideally) there are opportunities for competitors to replace the defective ones. (It doesn't always work that way in practice, due to startup costs, network effects, etc., of course.)

Aerospace has high startup costs, so it's been a tough one. Fortunately, with SpaceX, some investors with very deep pockets have decided to have a go. They've also gotten funding from the government, but so far have largely avoided getting tied into any existing pork, which is great.

Private contractors cannot afford the screw ups. Oh I am sure they will screw up but when your trying to make a buck in a high risk area you do your damned best to eliminate all those risks, especially ones that will end your business like losing a life.

By the time business ends, the manager who made the decisions leading to it has already cashed in his bonuses for his part in cutting costs and moved somewhere else. Similarly, the shareholders who rewarded him have cashed in on the temporary stock prize bo

But how much extra will you spend for say a 2% points reduction in risk? Let us assume a crew of 5 astronauts. Will you spend 50 million USD extra per launch for that? This means that you are spending 10 million USD to remove a 2% of an astronaut dying. Or on average 500 million USD to save an astronaut.

Of course my numbers are pulled out of my a** and there are also other costs of mission failure. And we don't even know if NASA can provide better safety. But the point is that NASA is spending a disproporti

I guaran-god-damned-tee that 2% risk reduction would be easy if we were not shoving 60+ % into contractors pockets to reelect senator dickfuck, not like we have a choice about it, our system is setup to only provide the opinion to our representatives, who do whatever the hell they feel like and say we voted for it.

Thats how a country votes in one guy, but the dumb fuck outdated points system votes in whoever the state wants in, weather it be a unqualified two faced, snaked tongued community member, or a fu

Since the cost of almost any NASA project can't be nailed down to within an order of magnitude anyway, pulling numbers out of your a** may be about as accurate as anything else you might find in any formal report that even comes from the GPO. I've seen the cost of a shuttle mission anywhere from about $50 million to about $5 billion (usually somewhere in between those numbers) depending on how you make the calculations... just to give an example. The costs for the ISS are in a similar range and even more

The difference here is that SpaceX is planning on selling flights to people other than the U.S. government, and thus is interested in a reasonable price that can induce those other customers to be using their services. They are hitting up other governments (South Korea, Brazil, and a few others) who are already going to be using Bigelow Aerospace modules for their astronaut programs, so the issue here is really the bottom line: How much does the spacecraft actually cost?

They are hitting up other governments (South Korea, Brazil, and a few others) who are already going to be using Bigelow Aerospace modules for their astronaut programs

Where do you get that information for Bigelow and the manned Brazilian space program? I used to work on the unmanned program and never heard something like that but I've been out for two or three years now. As far as I know, there's no man-rated space vehicle planned and VLS-2 was being redeveloped with Ukrainian cooperation after a VLS-1 launch pad explosion that killed a good number of engineers. There was some talk of direct cooperation with Russians but I don't know how that went. The program is probabl

Where do you get that information for Bigelow and the manned Brazilian space program?

I don't know what capsule that the Brazilian Space Agency is going to be using, but Brazil is one of the countries who have signed an agreement to lease and/or purchase one of the Bigelow modules. I presume that would involve either purchasing spaceflight from one of the existing companies or perhaps creating their own space capsule to get up to that space station on their own.

Bigelow doesn't have the list of countries on their website but there are some other stories that have come up fairly recently. Th

The cited article has no links to Bigelow. It's difficult to imagine it would happen in the actual political context. One of the main aims of the Brazilian space program is to develop the local industry. Buying from SpaceX or Bigelow with a technology transfer program is difficult to imagine (there are legal American restrictions too). Buying without a technology transfer program should be a no-no and will probably be seen as a useless marketing gimmick, much like the when the first Brazilian astronaut flew in a Soyuz capsule just like a space tourist.

The article cites the "Cruzeiro do Sul" proposed rocket family. "Cruzeiro do Sul" depends of the Russian cooperation. Russia (MAI) has been providing training to engineers. How well the training is going and how much time it will take until those newly trained engineers to be able to engage in a useful project remains to be seen. I do have a lot of admiration for the IAE guys but I don't have much faith in the Russian cooperation program. And now Jobim resigned from the Defense Ministery - Jobim was a major backer of the Russian cooperation agreement - my hopes aren't high.

A new Brazilian capsule is probably out of question since SARA - a proposed unnamed reentry capsule for microgravity experiments - didn't even fly yet. And I'm not sure it will, considering the current deep budget cuts.

Don't take AEB press releases seriously. AEB is the problem, not the solution. The Brazilian space program is run by two entities: INPE (satellites, space physics research) and IAE/CTA (launchers). AEB is just a useless bureaucratic overhead, created because politicians and international observers didn't like the space program being run by the Air Force (maybe out of the fear of a imaginary secret ballistic missile program).

The article I cited was just one of several that I've seen recently about the Brazilian space program. Stuff is definitely happening which is why I cited that article, but the link between Bigelow and Brazil is something I can't find straight off at the moment, but I know it exists as I've seen numerous reliable (to me) references to it over the past couple of months about it.

Bigelow signed an agreement with nearly a dozen countries to fly astronauts of those countries into space for various projects, alth

Assuming Brazil could build something competitive to SpaceX, I don't see why they wouldn't be considered, but I also have no inside knowledge as to what Brazil may or may not be doing in space.

I don't think that Bigelow would be a serious option is that it adds no knowledge to the space program. It's a box, a fancy box, a gadget. The fundamental point of the space program is to make the country know how to build stuff. Buying previously made stuff from other countries makes no sense under this light. It could still be done, if the country is unable to launch something on it's own. The first Brazilian sat in GEO was bought from Boeing, being subcontracted from Hughes Eletronics. Hughes, as part of

Except that, should they do this, they will then cost as much as or more than the Chinese they are boasting about undercutting. They are saying that they are in an open market for non-man-rated launches to orbit: they are competing with the Russian and Chinese national launch systems. If they start with "teaser" rates and then raise them, a canny buyer will take the teaser and then go elsewhere once it expires. It has already been shown that you can switch a payload from one launch system to another for not

You're silly. The "safety regulations" are not hiking up the prices. Everyone wants a successful mission. Cutting corners usually means losing the mission. There's nothing particular that SpaceX is doing differently in the safety department that the big boys (Lockheed and Boeing) do differently. SpaceX just happens to waste an order of magnitude less money doing so. I guess you're nowhere near the current government contracting: they waste so much money it's crazy. Your mistaken belief is that somehow Space

So "these prices are not arbitrary, premised on capturing a dominant share of the market, or âoeteaserâ rates meant to lure in an eager market only to be increased later"; perhaps not, but you already announce that SpaceX will cover any cost overruns and will pay for them "themselves", i.e. the customer after you will pay for them.

Or by taking less profits (or more loss), like most companies do when their cost to provide a service is not aligned with what they are able to sell the service for.

This notion that if a company's costs increase for any reason, that cost will necessarily be passed on to the customer makes the illogical un-capitalistic assumption that the company is not already charging as much as they can without reducing sales such that they make less money.

And, in terms of the prosperity of the country, has this been a bad thing? Countries that have not had government-funded development have remained technically backward. Countries that have hugged their government-funded development to their government heart have had inefficient, unreliable tech industries. Th US has got the leading position it has by the very process you describe of government developing a technology to prove it was viable, then leaving it to private enterprise to make something marketable

First off, it IS state-sponsored socialism. We have been socialists since before Ben Franklin created the fire dept. And yes, it is socalists for us to do this R&D and then pass it off to our industries. Personally, I do not have an issue with that.

The problem is that many of these companies now send the items to china to be produced.

And as to having DAPRA, NASA, etc stopped, well, China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Al Qaeda, etc would be ecstatic about that idea.